New state budget continues to support some bad voucher schools

Lawmakers should do more to ensure tax dollars are taken from failing schools

Of course, it's been an excellent budget season for all private schools that want public financial support — statewide expansion of vouchers, tax deductions for those who pay tuition to elementary and high schools, big jumps in state payments for each voucher student a year from now, some last-minute helpful surprises.

But the lousy operators must be feeling especially good. Why? Because nothing was done to drive them to improve or stop taking state money. Come this fall, a cluster of low performing, poorly run voucher schools will still enroll thousands of kids and take millions of dollars in state money.

Even the most adamant voucher supporters agree that there are schools in Milwaukee that don't merit public support. There is a large range of quality among the 110+ schools that take voucher students. Some are excellent, many are of average quality. And some really stand out when it comes to being bad.

Somehow, a solution that promotes quality and responsible use of public money seems off the table in Wisconsin.

I regard myself as one of the few people on Earth who has no pro or con position on vouchers. A professional obligation — I'm neutral. But I've followed the program closely for 15 years and visited something around 100 voucher schools. I'm not neutral when it comes to quality.

In the past eight years, the regulatory climate has changed in ways that put a few dozen schools out of business, which is good. But the cluster of weak schools persists and appears to have grown in the last couple of years.

I'm talking about schools such as Ceria Travis Academy and its partner, Travis Technology High School, which between them had 699 students last fall and which have received almost $40 million in public money in recent years. In this year's state tests, no student at either school was rated proficient or advanced in either reading or math. At Ceria Travis, 88% of fourth graders were rated "minimal" in reading. When I asked school leaders last fall to describe their reading program, they said there wasn't one — teachers (who come and go at a fast pace) are left to decide.

Do you want your tax dollar to support this school? It is and will continue to do so.

Andy Smarick is author of a recent book, "The Urban Education System of the Future," and a nationally known education figure with conservative credentials. In a tweet May 30, he wrote, "Some private schools are lousy. Voucher programs are only as good as the schools allowed to participate!"

That's a notion that's too foreign to Wisconsin. Except for one period when there was a new school approval board, it's been pretty easy for a school to join the voucher program and stay in it. (And now the doors are being opened to rapid fire statewide expansion of vouchers this summer with little vetting of participating schools beyond requiring that they were in existence May 1.)

Overall, too little has been done to link the words "voucher" and "quality."

The new state budget includes a provision that voucher schools maintain accreditation, which means an outside group giving them a stamp of approval. State law since 2006 has required voucher schools to get accredited. Just months ago, it was realized that some schools had been dropped by their accreditors. The state Department of Public Instruction said it couldn't do anything about this because the law required only getting accreditation, not maintaining it. Making maintaining a requirement will allow accreditation to be used as an effective tool, voucher advocates say. I regard it as closing an unintended loophole. Besides, most of the bottom schools have accreditation, which shows how ineffective accreditation can be.

I posed my concern about nothing being done about bad schools to Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, last week. Excerpts from his response:

"I don't disagree with any of the questions you raise, except accreditation. But the answer to those questions is not one of intent — I have stated publicly many times that I share the concerns about low-performing schools — it is a question of how."

Bringing vouchers into the state school report card system — they're exempt now — has been proposed, but it wouldn't have impact for at least six years, Bender said. His organization strongly opposes giving the DPI, which it regards as an enemy, the power to remove a school from the program.

"The problem is creating a model that is accurate and that nobody will abuse. I don't have one and I have not seen one that works," Bender wrote.

Here's an idea from Smarick: In a conversation Friday, he said voucher supporters 20 years ago were gung-ho on parental choice as the way to drive quality. What's needed now is what Smarick called Choice 2.0, where choice and oversight of quality combine. Similar to the way a charter school is authorized to open and then required to come back every several years to get permission to continue, a body could be charged with controlling the gate to getting voucher money and the green light for continuing to get it. Smarick would apply this concept pretty much to all schools, including traditional public schools.

Smarick said this would be good for kids, directing them to higher performing schools, and for the voucher movement, which would be associated with better results. He said he was excited about the voucher rules in Louisiana, which include cutting off schools that do not meet minimum standards for results for students, a step the state superintendent is currently aiming to take against seven schools.

Milwaukee and Wisconsin could gain a lot "if you could now take this next step of being just as determined as possible about quality," Smarick said.

There are a few fronts on which that is happening here. Dealing with the bottom of the voucher school spectrum is not one of them.

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.